I've been playing a mix of role playing games for the last 16 years and i am currently looking for some feedback on my 3.5 home rules and quick fixes. Any feedback is welcome, i am mainly looking to see if these rules are fun/fair/make sense. sorry if this is a little unclear, i need to take time to make this all more coherent one day.

Protection from X spells. This line of spells no longer offer immunity to mind influencing, compulsion, or enchantment affects. Instead they offer a +2 bonus to resist such affects. Justification: a level one spell should never make an entire school of magic useless.

Negative hit points and dying. A character does not have a hit points pool of -10 when they reach 0. Instead, a character receives a hit points pool in the negatives equal to one quarter of their normal hit points. A Fighter with 100 hit points must go down to -25 to die completely. Stabilization checks are allowed each round. The feat diehard doubles your negative hit point pool to half your maximum HP.

Offhand weapons receive the full benefit of STR scores instead of half STR when used in melee combat.

Weapon finesse is free, like wise, you may add DEX to damage on any melee or ranged attack roles.

Power Attack can be used with Bows.

HP is Maximized at first level. At levels beyond the first, Players have the option of using the ½ and ½ +1 rule when determining HP, or rolling for it.

Weapon focus and specialization are treated like a warblades and can be swapped out in the same way.

Two Weapon Fighting is one feat that scales with BAB in concordance with the old/other TWF Feats. Additionally, there is no penalty for using medium sized weapons in your off hand.

Rogues Can sneak attack anything regardless of anatomy of physiology. Somehow they just managed to hurt things, hard.

Precise shot and Point blank shot are one feat.

Rapid Shot scales like TWF, offering additional shots at the same rate as two weapon fighting. Each shot only incurs a -2 penalty.

Rangers:
Rangers gain wild shape as an ability at first level and advance as a druid. This ability functions exactly like a druids.
Rangers gains access to both fighting styles, they need not choose one
Rangers treat animal companions like a druids, and are not considered to be 4 levels behind

Druids:Druids have three capstones, wildshape, spellcasting, and animal companions. WHen creating a druid, pick two of these and discard the third.
Natural spell casting is not a thing.

Paladins:
Spellcasting advances at half that of a clerics. They gain all cleric spells and one domain from their god or ideology.
SKill points for paladins are based off their wisdom score.
Paladins may use their CON or WIS score in place of str or dex for to hit and damage rolls if they wish. This does not apply to character who simply dip paladin.

Fighters and Rogues get to pick one save to upgrade to "good"

Fighters get 4 skill points + INT per level. Recommended to only take 2-3 levels as a dip, there is no saving this class.

Monks - Play an unarmed swordsage, there is no saving this class. I let Players pick up unarmed damage progression for free if they want to play a hand to hand fighter. I also allow players to take other monk class features for free if they wish, i often allow wisdom to armour to be either wisdom or intelligence or con to Armour for those characters.

Hide and Move Silently are one skill, Sneak. Likewise, spot, search, and listen are all under perception as a single skill.

There are no metamagic reducers, you will pay the full price.

Magic weapons and armour need not be +1 first to enchant with abilities. If you just want a speeded, but not +1 sword, go for it.

SR Items are heavily modified for price, most are around half off and scale, cant find my document for them :(.

Rogues get a D8 hit die

Players interested in playing barbarians are allowed to play a TOB class with barbarian features added on top of it, for a reduction in the number of maneuvers and stances known.

The spells mage armour and shield work on team mates, they also stack with any other sources. (this helps low level characters a lot)

Celerity is banned
Polymorph line of schools are changed to be in line with pathfinder rules.

All classes receive perception as a class skill.

Color Spray now only affects 1-3 hit die and only confers a stacking bonus to the daze status.
Faerie Fire now does not blind foes
Shivering Touch does not exist
Blaster Spells have no cap on the amount of dice they can do

Cleric Heals now heal double their amount rolled

Kamai

2014-05-11, 03:03 AM

There's a lot of hit or miss here. In a sense of inter-tier balancing, I'd be worried about archers being generally better than melee combatants, with it getting much worse if you intend for composite bows to add both Strength and Dexterity. On top of this, if you're getting Rapid shot, you're suddenly using Two-handed size weapons (damage wise) to TWF, which now why am I using a Two-handed weapon? Featless Dex to damage means that there is almost 0 reason to have Strength.

Removing iterative penalties is awesome, but you further invalidate armor using PCs, since the balance point is that AC soaks iterative attacks.

Negative Hit Points: This makes 1st-3rd level play worse. A 18 con barbarian has 16hp, and dies at -4 at level 1, as compared to dying at -10 in standard rules. It takes getting to mid-levels to break even except on the most health oriented characters.

Paladins: You may want to have a rule for the Cha/Wis to attacks. Someone who goes Paladin 2/Sorcerer X is obviously dipping, but I'm sure there are murkier cases. Also, Paladins are still sad with their 1 attack Smite Evil.

Mage armor/shield spells: Does this really make a meaningful difference in 1-3? There's just so few spell slots, and these spells don't last long enough, that it just doesn't help low levels. At higher levels, you're going to get some weird stacking effects, which is something you can't intend. If you want to help low levels through AC, you could try changing the AC formula to something like 12 + modifiers, maybe 14 + modifiers. If applied across the board, it could be really hard for PCs to hit, though.

Monks: You're lucky your Druids/Wizards aren't dipping unarmed swordsage for stat to AC for unarmored. Again, not sure how to make it dip proof.

Cure X wounds: Bleck, they still scale very poorly, and I probably don't want to use a standard action and a spell slot on them after 5th level, and it doesn't really make the mass spells do anything, which are already worse offenders.]

The other spells: They're a start, but I think you have a long list of offenders. Ones that I'd want to hit: Entangle, Glitterdust, Mirror Image, Wind Wall, Fly (and 3rd and 4th level polymorph spells that give flight options), Web, Knock, and Blink (that's a really touchy one, due to the easy sneak attacks for rogues, though). All of these, imo, say no to a lot of stuff way to easily and early.

Xerlith

2014-05-11, 05:20 AM

With your iterative attacks - I'd propose making it a flat -5 penalty to-hit. so a 20th lvl fighter would attack for +20/+15/+15/+15.

If Power Attack with Bows is 1:1 ratio, I think it's okay. You might instead use PF's Deadly Aim (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/deadly-aim-combat)for some more punch.

Now I'll propose two of my own houserules (since we're following a similar path of thought, I think) to supplement those you're using. Judge them yourself: